1. Field of the Invention
The present invention concerns performing remote maintenance and servicing of a network peripheral device over the World Wide Web or other network.
2. Description of the Related Art
Traditionally, when a peripheral device, such as a copier, required manufacturer's maintenance or servicing, the end user contacted the company's technical support or servicing department which then dispatched a service technician to visit the user's site and service the device. In addition, in many cases a service technician would visit the user's site on a periodic basis to perform scheduled maintenance.
Thus, the traditional method of providing maintenance and service for a device ordinarily required a service technician to physically visit the site where the device is located. Moreover, several visits might be required if, upon the first visit, the technician discovered that he did not have with him one or more tools or parts to further diagnose or correct a discovered problem.
Accordingly, there has long existed a need to reduce the number of site visits required to be made by service technicians, and when a site visit is required, to provide the service technician with advance information regarding any problems that might exist.
Point-to-point modem connections have been used in the past to accomplish some of these goals. However, installing a modem in the peripheral device is many times redundant, as most large organizations maintain modem bank servers on their LANs. Additionally, such a technique requires the peripheral device to have access to an available analog phone line, which is often difficult to find large companies.